“What we ended up with in recent decades are fragmented structures: educators who are not listening to academic knowledge production because their time is just spent on reproducing knowledge; researchers who don’t feed back their knowledge into the educational sphere because they are bought out or are buying themselves out from education; civil society which is not listening to academic knowledge production because it generates its own professionalization, the dynamic of which has nothing to do with academic reflection; and academics who are not paying attention to the usability of their ideas in real life.” This is how Balázs Trencsényi, Professor at the CEU History Department and Lead Researcher at the CEU Democracy Institute, describes the larger challenge that the projects he is currently involved in aim to address.

Delving into the research conducted at the Democracy in History group of the CEU Democracy Institute and ongoing initiatives such as the Invisible University for Ukraine and the Academics Facing Autocracy Program in this conversation with Lucija Balikić, Trencsényi provides historically informed insights into the modalities of relinking these structures and offers inspiring reflections on their potential for strengthening democratic societies across the globe.

In collaboration with Lucie Hunter